The emergency response exercise is part training and part competition among 35 local, state, national and international SWAT teams. This year’s exercise included groups from Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Las Vegas and the California Highway Patrol, along with 31 Bay Area SWAT teams.
Its heart beating rapidly, a wild gray flycatcher sits in the palm of a steady hand, waiting for just the right moment to make its escape. The moment lasts mere seconds, but it’s filled with emotion, from fear to connection to protection. Moments like this don’t happen for most people, but for a handful of biologists in Sandia's ecology program, they do.
As part of Sandia's ecology program, wildlife biologists set up and check herpetofaunal traps around Sandia lands to gather data on species in the area. The data, combined with other baseline monitoring, are used to to observe long-term habitat changes.
More than 200 members of Sandia’s workforce got a realistic taste of what might happen in a shooting incident on July 25 in the annual full-scale emergency exercise at the New Mexico site.